When Queensland Police's Special Branch monitored Peter Beattie during his young activist days in the 1970s, they filed information under the code number 2E.1528.

The controversial branch - a small but secretive part of the police force from the 1940s to the 1980s - used 2E in the file numbers of state-based industrial and political activists it kept an eye on.

I would be very worried if I thought big brothers weren't there.

Beattie, a law student who would eventually become a long-serving Queensland premier, did not fit into the other codes: A for communists, B for Jews or J for Jehovah's Witnesses.

The future union and political leader was one of many to attract the Special Branch's attention, having joined fiery protests against the 1971 tour of the Springboks rugby team to Australia amid anger over South Africa's apartheid policy.

Advertisement

Beattie says the Special Branch performed an "insidious" role that overstepped the bounds of a healthy democracy. Officers would turn up at street rallies and protest meetings to take photographs, record attendees and transcribe speeches before forwarding information to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

Barry Krosch, who worked in the Special Branch for nine years before being seconded to help with the landmark Fitzgerald Inquiry, talked frankly about the unit's activities during a recent public lecture organised by the Queensland Police Museum.

Krosch was on hand when Brisbane's Bellevue Hotel was torn down under the cover of darkness in 1979. He admits many people viewed the Special Branch with suspicion but says officers believed they were performing an important role in keeping the state safe.

What was the Special Branch?

Queensland's Special Bureau, as it was then called, began work in Brisbane in July 1940.

Its establishment followed the creation of similar intelligence-gathering bodies in the United Kingdom.

Early internal reports from the 1940s show the bureau was tasked with launching "investigations into subversive organisations and their subsidiary bodies and all aliens" and communism was a key concern.

Krosch points to a 1942 Queensland Police Department annual report which shows the bureau was worried about "study circles organised in private homes, under the guise of card evenings, where open discussion on world's politics is freely indulged in, where care is taken to see that the main topic under discussion is socialism, as they call their particular form of politics".

Other bodies under the spotlight were the Citizens Air Raid Precaution Scheme, the Queensland Unemployed Workers State Council, the Australia First Movement, the Russian Fascists, Jehovah's Witnesses and trade union factions.

The bureau kept in close contact with federal intelligence, security and military agencies.

Officers make light work

Krosch quotes from an internal memo about the Special Branch's operations on February 16, 1942.

"There was a case recently of alleged Morse Code being carried on by means of a light," the note says.

"This complaint was investigated by myself and P C Const Smith and although there was nothing in the alleged Morse Code signals, it resulted in discovering an unnaturalised and unregistered full-blooded German close to the Enoggera Military Camp."

Special Bureau detectives began returning to the Brisbane Criminal Investigation Branch in 1944, but subsequent meat and rail strikes prompted the unit's re-establishment in 1948.

Apart from monitoring, the branch also provided protection for VIPs.

Officers outside the Special Branch were asked to help the unit track known, suspected and avowed communists.

Criticism

Civil libertarians and activists are scathing of the Special Branch's role in the 1970s and 1980s as Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen's conservative government tried to stop street marches and quell dissent.

Lawyer Terry O'Gorman says the Special Branch was a "thoroughly insidious organisation" that kept files on some students who never committed any violence, hindering their public sector job prospects.

"The Special Branch was used in an overt political manner by the Bjelke-Petersen government," O'Gorman says.

"It was not a police unit that in fact looked at the prospect of political violence; rather it was used to ruin the careers of young students who did nothing worse than protest against many of the policies of the then Bjelke-Petersen government."

Aboriginal socialist activist Sam Watson says he helped establish indigenous community organisations and political parties in the late 1960s and the 1970s, prompting monitoring by the Special Branch.

"They raided our place every couple of weeks," Watson says.

"In 1970, we were running a very active anti-Vietnam campaign with regular rallies and marches and protest meetings; the Special Branch were always there in the background."

Watson says officers tried to infiltrate some of the leadership groups.

"There were clandestine officers dressed in hippy gear," he recalls.

Krosch, who was a Special Branch officer from 1978 to 1987, says his colleagues "really believed in what they were doing".

"I'm aware that a lot of people were very suspicious about special branch; a lot of protest activity against Special Branch," he says.

"But by the same token a great majority of Queenslanders and Australians, I believe the great majority of Queenslanders, didn't have an issue with Special Branch. At the time - this was in the Joh era - most Queenslanders thought Joh was doing the right thing."

Beattie says the Special Branch impeded personal freedoms.

"Their role was regarded by the government of the day as important but not by history. History will regard the Special Branch's role as insidious," Beattie says in an email to brisbanetimes.com.au.

Files shredded

In 1989, the tumultuous year when the Fitzgerald report was handed down and the Goss government swept to power, the Special Branch was disbanded in line with an inquiry recommendation.

Griffith University-based historian Mark Finnane bemoans the fact files kept by the Special Branch were shredded.

"As historians we thought it important in 1989 that this controversial part of the state's history should be preserved," he says.

"The kind of records that police and other intelligence agencies produce are themselves important sources for what happened in the past.

"If we want to know what happened in the French Revolution, or how Mao came to power in China, or why the Young Stalin developed in the way he did, or how the Irish revolutionary movement developed into a weapon at the heart of Empire, then there's nothing quite as good as the archives of police or military intelligence files, as long as they are read the right way."

Krosch agrees.

"How can we learn from our mistakes of the past if we don't have the history, if we don't have the record?"

Big Brother watching us?

George Orwell's doomsday novel Nineteen Eighty-Four tells of a future world in which authorities track everyone's movements and the people with whom they associate.

Krosch characterises the Special Branch as Queensland's own Big Brother-style monitor, albeit a smaller and less intrusive operation than that envisaged in Orwell's novel.

It may have been disbanded, but debate continues to rage about the level of surveillance citizens should be subjected to.

Would the public be right to worry about what state police forces and national agencies such as ASIO know about them? Krosch turns the question on its head.

"They shouldn't be very worried, they should trust them," he says.

"I would be very worried if I thought big brothers weren't there.

"I really think there is a need, and I think any reasonable Australian would believe there's a need for well-managed intelligence agencies.

"There are obviously people around Australia who should be kept under surveillance by the national authorities and by the state authorities.

"If a group was meeting somewhere in Brisbane to conspire to blow up Tarong power station or something, I would like to think someone in the Queensland police force has got an agent there and reporting back to them. That's the role of legitimate intelligence agencies."

Krosch says state and federal agencies have tightened up their charters since the Special Branch was scrapped, reducing the level of decision-making left in the hands of individual officers.

"I would like to think everyone's learnt in the last 20 years or so," he says.

"I do know the police department has a target committee. If I wanted to start doing a file on you or any person, it would have to go before a target committee. You'd have to justify it."

Finnane says the functions of Special Branch continue in other guises, but the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s have left their legacy on this aspect of policing.

Police charters now recognise the need to balance security concerns against the rights of lawful assembly and free speech.

O'Gorman says there's no evidence that the Queensland Police Service is acting in a similar manner to the previous Special Branch.

But he says it is critical the Crime and Misconduct Commission monitors the service to ensure it doesn't slip back into its old "oppressive" ways.

8 comments so far

They should spend more time spying on fraud, nepotism mismanagement and inefficiency in goverment than looking in other people's backyards.

The only time I would support state spies is if they were attached to the Auditor-General's unit or the CMC for the above purpose!

Commenter

Waste

Date and time

April 07, 2010, 8:01AM

Joh gave us Big Brother the police force - Beattie gave us Big Brother the TV show........I still don't know which is worse......honestly!

Commenter

Scotness

Location

Brisbane

Date and time

April 07, 2010, 8:13AM

So the Unemployed Workers Union was a target of Special Branch. Heaven forbid a group of persons gather to try and ease the problems faced by persons "living" on the dole.
Were the late night "car-rides" also necessary for the protection of Queenslanders?

Commenter

BigRev

Location

Brisbane

Date and time

April 07, 2010, 9:10AM

This is a lesson in why the people should be suspicious and critical when governments look to enact sweeping laws to protect us from terrorists and the internet. It's too easy for people in power to manipulate laws to their own end. There should be oversight and transparency at all times.

Commenter

berihebi

Date and time

April 07, 2010, 9:50AM

I can assure you that it still exists, albeit under a different guise.

Commenter

DoctorPhil

Location

Brisbane

Date and time

April 07, 2010, 10:15AM

I know aboriginal and anti-war activists who were subjected to multiple searches and harrassment by Qld Special branch including a friend who was approached by special branch officers at a bus stop, lifted off the street, taken to their headquarters and had a gun put against their head and told to get out of Qld - the only difference between them and the KGB is that they didn't pull the trigger.

Commenter

Paul

Location

Ballarat

Date and time

April 07, 2010, 12:07PM

@DoctorPhil: You know this how?

Commenter

Mark Harrison

Location

Brisbane

Date and time

April 07, 2010, 2:26PM

To quote from a bad movie with a good message:
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

Conroy's Internet filter is a bad thing for all the same reasons that this unit was. Secretive, no oversight and thus open to abuse.